Siki Chen, founder of corporate financial planning app Runway, said his daughter Mira was diagnosed with a brain tumor in September and that research and funding were «lacking» due to the rarity of the disease. He had been raising the necessary funds through crowdfunding, but was able to complete the fundraising when the MIRA memecoin appeared.
Siki Chen, founder of corporate financial planning app Runway, said his daughter Mira was diagnosed with a brain tumor in September and that research and funding were «lacking» due to the rarity of the disease. He had been raising the necessary funds through crowdfunding, but was able to complete the fundraising when the MIRA memecoin appeared.
As Coindesk reports, Chen’s GoFundMe page had raised 80% of its $300,000 goal on Thursday, which will go directly to research at Hankinson’s lab at the University of Colorado. He was also collecting donations for his crypto wallets.
But significantly more funds were raised when a user created a MIRA token on the Pump.fun platform and added a photo of Siki Chen and his daughter to it. Pump.fun allows anyone to issue a token with a capital of less than $2, after which the user chooses the number of tokens, the theme and the meme image that will accompany it. When the market capitalization of any token reaches $69,000, some of the liquidity is transferred to the Raydium exchange, which is based on Solana.
This worked. Twitter user X @Waddles_eth bought 50% of the supply and sent it to Chen, and the Runway founder later increased the number of memecoins by posting on his X account.
uh so some random guy 20 minutes made a SOL memecoin called $MIRA to help with research fundraising and sent me half the entire supply and it’s now worth like $400K and i literally don’t know what to do because i certainly don’t want to rug a bunch of random people https://t.co/P78bLq52fB
— Siqi Chen (@blader) December 26, 2024
The market cap of memecoin Pump.Fun has grown from zero to $80 million after a father’s call to donate to research for his daughter’s rare brain cancer caught the attention of many crypto traders.
This gave the token a viral boost, sending its price soaring from a fraction of a cent to a peak of 8 cents early Thursday. The value of Chen’s tokens skyrocketed from $400,000 to over $18 million. After MIRA became widely traded, its liquidity peaked at $7 million (in both SOL and memecoins).
The price of the MIRA token has fallen 80% from Thursday’s peak and is trading at just over a cent on Friday. But while late buyers are suffering losses, the project’s efforts have raised over $1 million for charity.
Trading volume exceeded $85 million in over 130,000 transactions, making it the most popular small-cap cryptocurrency in the last 24 hours.
«I’ve been on the internet for 30 years and have seen a lot, but this is by far the craziest day of my life. I will be liquidating $1,000 worth of $MIRA every 10 minutes, all the time. If this schedule changes, I will be announcing it within 24 hours,» Chen wrote on X as prices skyrocketed.
He added that he ultimately plans to raise at least $1 million for research into rare diseases. The crypto community’s reaction to the event was largely positive, with some users noting how such memecoins could contribute to positive outcomes in the world.
Recall that earlier, newly elected US President Donald Trump officially announced the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency, which he called «DOGE» in his statement. One of its heads was Elon Musk, who has repeatedly promoted the meme cryptocurrency Dogecoin (DOGE).
